My stash - what's in it and organisation

Sarah from Sarah Quilts is hosting a linky party so that we can all satisfy our curiosity about other people's stashes.  The linky is open until Thursday 15 August so you have time if you want to join in too.  I'm currently on a self-imposed fabric buying ban for the month of August so this is a good way to get a free fabric fix.

 

I was a little hesitant about sharing my stash - not just because I have an embarrassingly large amount of fabric, but also because I know how it feels to have major fabric envy (not fun!). 

In this post I thought I'd share photos of my stash and a little about how I organise it (because it's taken me a while to get it organised in a way that works for me).  If people are interested, next week I thought I might share some thoughts about stashing strategies, because I have quite deliberately built up my stash over the course of the last two and a half years.
      
First up a little about organisation - I keep my stash organised in four sets of plastic drawers (three drawers in each set) which live in my sparefabric room.  It just so happens that the drawers fit three rows of folded fabric perfectly.  I like storing my stash like this because I can see all the fabric in a drawer at once, it's easy to take some fabric out without disturbing the whole system, and each drawer is light enough for me to lift comfortably, even when full.  Together, these things mean that I actually use my stash.

 

Most of my fabric is organised by colour.  The colour organised drawers hold cuts of fabric between a fat eighth and a metre.  Smaller pieces go in my scrap bin, and larger cuts have their own set of drawers.  These are all my red and pink fabrics.

 

These are the yellow and orange fabrics.  I need more orange.

 

Navy, purple and mid to dark greys.

 

Aqua, turquoise, light and medium blues.  I don't need any more of these!

 

White, cream, light grey and other light neutrals.  Looking at this photo, I can see that I could really move some of the greys to the mid/dark greys section - that's useful and I hadn't really spotted it looking at this drawer in person.

 

Black (this part of my stash is looking healthy after I made a concerted effort to stock up), and green.

 

The fabrics on the left are all for one quilt, the ones in the middle are pulled for another quilt, and the ones on the right are my brown fabrics (these get used surprisingly often).

These multi-coloured fabrics don't fit neatly into any of the other colour categories so I keep them together in their own drawer.

 

Solids on the left - I've found it useful to keep them all together while the Simply Solids Bee is underway.  In the middle are a couple of fat quarter bundles I decided to keep together - Timber and Leaf and Heaven and Helsinki.  On the right is Anna Maria Horner's latest collection - Hand Drawn Garden, and a selection of co-ordinating solids.

 

These are my large cuts of fabric - more than 1 metre.  Sometimes these are for quilt backs and sometimes they are for borders and sashing (or just things I think I'll use a lot of like neutral solids).

 

More large cuts.

And the last of the large cuts.

By the way, my stash is looking super organised at the moment because I just tidied my spare room and put away a bunch of fabric that had overflowed off the bed and onto the floor.  If you follow me on instagram you'll know what I mean.  It definitely does not always look like this and the rest of my house is nowhere this tidy or organised (gotta have priorities!).

So what do you reckon about my stash?  Are you interested in my thoughts on stashing strategies? And do you think I will make right through the month of August without buying any fabric?